As a former Marine with expertise in counterintelligence, Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and Technical Surveillance Counter-Measures (TSCM), Jason Passwaters leveraged his international war fighting experience and built uniquely qualified teams at iSIGHT Partners, and then in co-founding Intel 471. His military service taught him to emphasize three areas that can make threat intelligence more targeted and actionable for organizations.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will issue a directive later this week requiring all pipeline companies to report cybersecurity incidents to federal authorities. The directive comes two weeks after Colonial Pipeline, which operates the biggest gasoline conduit to the East Coast, was forced to shut down its 5,500-mile pipeline after a devastating ransomware attack.
The FBI identified at least 16 Conti ransomware attacks targeting U.S. healthcare and first responder networks, including law enforcement agencies, emergency medical services, 9-1-1 dispatch centers, and municipalities within the last year. These healthcare and first responder networks are among the more than 400 organizations worldwide victimized by Conti, over 290 of which are located in the U.S.
Distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks - when an attacker attempts to make it impossible for a service to be deliverable - are increasing in size, frequency and duration. Kaspersky Lab reported a doubling of DDoS attacks in the first quarter of 2020 compared with the fourth quarter of 2019, plus an 80% jump compared with the same quarter last year. To learn more about how these attacks have evolved over the years, we talk to Roy Horev, Co-Founder and CTO at Vulcan Cyber, a vulnerability remediation orchestration provider.
As employees return back to the office, challenges continue to unfold and the best way to approach many of the computers and systems that have been off company premises for so long is to regard them as potentially infected.
The traditional approach to securing cloud access goes against everything that DevOps is about. Regardless of what providers of legacy IAM, PAM, and other security solutions claim about their ability to scale with cloud application dev cycles, they’re concealing the extensive time, effort, and resources required to manage their solutions – three things that are in short supply in DevOps teams. So, the challenge becomes: how can enterprises integrate world class technologies for securing identities and access to cloud environments without bringing DevOps to a grinding halt?
Now, let’s consider how the pandemic has impacted the world of cybercrime. In the beginning, the move to work from home was swift, with organizations being closed and the workforce being sent home to work with little or no warning. People began stockpiling items and even staples such as toilet paper became a scarce commodity. As schools closed, the students were forced to start doing classes online, something a lot of families were not prepared for. Many found themselves in financial difficulties. For those still working, with daycares closing, childcare became an issue, and many people did not have laptops or computers set up at home to support these changes. Even webcams became nearly impossible to get unless you were willing to pay the scalpers’ prices.
Vectra AI, provider of threat detection and response, released its 2021 Q2 Spotlight Report, Vision and Visibility: Top 10 Threat Detections for Microsoft Azure AD and Office 365. This new research details the top 10 threat detections that customers receive by relative frequency when Vectra detects abnormal behavior in a customer environment, which are then used by customers to help ratify attacks in cloud environments.
The recent ransomware attack of the Colonial Pipeline has reinvigorated calls from legislators to strengthen the defenses of U.S. pipelines and the electric power grid. Over the last several years, a repeatable pattern is becoming apparent with each major cyber-attack. A critical cyberattack occurs that is followed by outrage that result in statements from government leaders with calls for action - all followed by proposed ideas on how to better mitigate the risk of cyberattacks in the future. Yet, it seems that time goes by and with the next major attack the cycle starts all over again. This time, government is taking a more rigorous approach to proposing solutions to end the vicious cycle.
The Standoff 2021 is taking place this week May 18-21, in conjunction with PHDays (Positive Hack Days) – one of the top cybersecurity conferences in Europe that features the world's cutting edge in digital security every year. The Standoff is an online offensive/defensive competition in which defenders (blue teams) compete against attackers (red teams) to control the infrastructure of a simulated digital city.
